Went back and read everything again - seems like the firmware update from last year, what I call the 'C' revision, isn't working well overall, though I have not noticed anything. As near as I can understand - it did fine refreshing data on the drive at the time of the update - but it doesn't really help data added to the drive after the firmware update. Thus revision D, which apparently does a periodic read write cycle on the drive.
Last time I did the firmware update I had no luck getting the iso file to work after burning it to a CD-RW. I found 1 blogger that said, essentially, - you have to rename the .iso file to .dmg file - then burn it. That worked for me with no issues at all. Have to wonder why burning the .iso file works for some folks and not others?
Fast forward to today - Following the same procedure. I can get the .iso file, I can rename the file to a .dmg file. and thats about as far as it goes. I've done a complete erase on a unused Memorex CD-RW disk, which reports as being successful. But at Burn, I get a fails to validate error and the optical drive ejects the disk. Upon reinserting the disk, Disk Utilities reports the disk as being unreadable. AARGH. I've tried a handful of other disks with similar results. I have not tried burning the .iso file itself to see if that works.
According to samsung, it is possible to create a bootable thumbdrive and perform the update. I've not tried that yet.
